5 Items to Delete From Your Website Today

Our blog, along with many others, are full of advice and instructions of things to add to your website. These often include:
start a blog
,
monitor social media
, or
optimize your site for search engines
. While all of these things are important, today I would like you to do something completely different: think about things you should stop doing.
When we add ideas and actions, websites become more complicated. Complication creates confusion and often translates to lower effectiveness. So today instead of telling you to add new things, we offer a few suggestions on things to remove from your
business website
.

1. Complicated Animations
- Flash-based animations can be bad for
search engine optimization
, but they can also complicate the website experience for visitors. Remember that when users visit your website, they looking for something specific. Animations can often be slow to load, which slows down the user and can make them abandon your website. Perform a test. Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site.

2. Industry Jargon
- Your website should be written for your customers. Assuming that potential customers know and understand industry terminology is a mistake. Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles. If you aren’t sure if a word should be removed, ask one of your customers if they are familiar with it. Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations.

3. Images
- Images are important. Images help to tell a story. However, many websites have too many images. The problem with having too many images is that they can drastically slow down the load time for your website in a web broswer. Search engines also take into consideration page load times when ranking websites. Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site. Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company’s story.

4. Long Pages of Text
- Research has shown that Internet users don’t like to scroll. Having a product page that is full of text and graphs that takes several scolls to reach the bottom is asking for your information to be ignored. The truth is that if you have long text pages of your website, you are probably trying to communicate too many ideas on that page. Read through and ask yourself, “Is this all about one topic?” If the answer is “no,” then divide that page into a couple short pages that each contain a single idea. This type of simplification will make it easier for your visitors and search engines to understand what your site and business is aobut.

5. “Contact Us” Form
- Contact us forms don’t work. Instead of qualified leads, they mostly attract spam. Having your business contact information as part of your website is critical. However, when it comes to using forms, use landing pages.
Landing pages
provide a dedicated form that is connected to a lead generation offer. For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment. You don’t have this clarity with a contact us form, and response rates for dedicated landing pages are much higher.

I am certainly in agreement regarding the flash. I will reasses my pages for industry jargon and "dumb" it down to English. Will try reducing images on my home page as a test. Long text is not an issue for me, I do disagree on the contact forms as over 75% of my qualified leads come tome thru this channel.

By "contact form," I hope you mean the generic form on the contact page of a website. Even so, I disagree with removing them. Forms draw visual attention and it's terribly easy to prevent spam from contact forms. To me, removing contact forms means removing one more way for a customer to contact you, and that's not something I'm willing to do.

We actually regularly get good leads from our Contact Us form (though we do have many other forms on our site). Also am hearing different things re: long text on pages - many folks I hear say that is no longer the case.

#2 is the most important one in my eyes - the aim should never be to patronise the visitor but assuming all visitors understand 100% of your industry terminology is just plain ignorant.

We're taking it a stage further with our new company website, creating a blog-type section which, among other things, will serve as a way of us explaining commonplace jargon in our markets. Not only will this help to de-mystify our industry to newcomers but, perhaps just as importantly, it should do wonders for our SEO!

Natalie

I also don't like having to answer 20 questions when I want to download a paper. I am happy to provide contact information, but typically don't fill out the survey questions accurately.

Images can be a big plus for a website if they are handled properly. I agree that when images are poorly laid out they are distracting, but for many products and services it's imperative to let the visitor see rather than just read about them. Also, websites often miss the boat by not optimizing images for search - image searches can send a lot of traffic.

Armando Roggio

Kipp, I think you were too hard on contact forms.

They are great for customer feedback, which is often a more important goal than getting a new lead.

Second, they can be an extension of brand. If a company brands itself as responsive to customers or customer focused, that company should offer several ways for customers to ask questions or make suggestions, including--I think--contact forms, telephone, chat, text, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I agree, but I kind of like having a contact page... but built out as a landing page. :)

It helps explain our lead generation offer, and is not blank and non-descript as most contact pages tend to be.

Kristen

Our current customers use our contact us form. We don't expect any leads from it, but our customers find it very convenient. We have a "Request a Proposal" form that caputures our leads.

sheena

i thought that contact information was somewhat of a "legal" requirement for websites. i'm not saying it's the best way to collect information, but i think it adds integrity to a website - i'm not happy with websites that have no "contact" information.

Very good stuff Kipp. I especially agree with getting rid of industry jargon. The curse of knowledge is alive and well on more than 99% of business websites on the net today. It's a huge problem, and one that needs serious attention from all marketers and business owners.

I agree that assuming potential customers understand acronyms and othe industry specific jargon is a mistake, when we do use acronyms I like to use the whole phrase first then put the acronym in ( ), when we do that we use the acronym later in the article.

Point#3 is a good take-away. While most of us are aware the load time issues and their impact on SEO-rank, an image often does the trick. A relevant image attracts interested audience, and also leaves a reference for re-visits. I completely agree with 'Brian Whalley', images should add to the website, shouldn't be website in all. Which images to keep and which to remove can be a tricky process, but I completely agree to the point here - Images can do serious damage and their use must be well-controlled.

PJ NAUGHTON

#4. Long pages of text. Maybe not many people may read them but the search engines will therefore increasing the probability of the page getting found.

I agree with earlier comments, contact form needs to stay. It's the most basic way for prospects and partners to reach out. For the 5 contacts that aren't appropriate, 1 may be a solid lead and it's worth it. Plus, the beauty is that you can pick and choose to whom you respond ...

Number 2 really resonated with me. In fact, I recently wrote a glossary of terms that I think those who read my blog should know, but perhaps don't. I'm thinking of making it a permanent tab on my site so people can refer back to it over and over. I don't want my readers not to know what I"m talking about, but I also want them to learn the more they read.

Although I get most of my signups from specific landing pages with quite high conversion rates (10% and greater), I still get regular contacts from the "contact us" page, so I'd highly recommend it.

The other thing I've seen is that those that do use the "contact us" page are people who are "hot to trot". They have already decided they need to talk with me so they immediately turn to the "contact us" page (although I have phone numbers on every page, some are so used to looking at "contact us" for the information, that's their comfort and that's where they go. So, they go there to call immediately, or to leave me a message in the contact us form.

In fact, for one of my clients, he gets about a 16% response rate from the contact us page. So I wouldn't ask him to remove it.

I would add too-obvious attempts to work the search engines. Like a paragraph that's so keyword dense, it's hard to find its meaning. My advice, write your copy to convey the message. Make the keywords and message consistent with each other. Keep the message fairly simple on each page. Keep the visitor focused and informed. The SEO will take care of itself.

Sounds! I hate it when I enter a site and all of a sudden I'm treated (?!) to a recorded interview or a song or soundtrack of some sort. And worse the only way to get rid of them is to leave the page. Not the intended effect I'm sure.

I can't say I agree with deleting the Contact Us form. I do agree that landing pages work better and contact us forms attract spam, but you should have both. People are used to seeing contact us pages and look for them when they're ready to make a decision.

AJ Barlas

I must say that I agree with the points raised above in regards to the contact form. Many of our clients receieve measurable leads and conversions through customers of their utilizing the contact form on their site. I would also like to know where the studies for 'people don't scroll online' came from? I used to be a believer of this, until the recent studies that I have seen suggesting otherwise. People do read online and dependant on how well the text on a site is layed out, dictates whether people will read on your site. I think that the 'people don't read online' mentality came from years past when the web was full of poorly designed pages with far too small of type and horrible leading, for a user to read comfortably.

I agree with all of these, especially #1, #2, . In terms of text, I think short and sweet is way better (make it obvious what you're offering in as few words as possible) and get rid of industry jargon for sure. Our own site is casual, I like to think I'm in a conversation with people. But in more traditional industries, we've been pushing people to at least not feel so attached to things like "quality service" and "dedicated to our customer" etc... it's bland, not unique, and over used. We really push people cling to how "safe" these phrases are to find fresher ways to think about these qualities.

Also, I really have begun to get irritated with sites that have so much animation it's either slow, or too distracting! I just visited a site yesterday that had their menu "bounce" on the end of little strings, and I couldn't even get it to stop long enough to click on the darn thing. Unnecessary!

Another comment. You seem to think that "avoiding getting solicitors calls" is a good thing and can be avoided by not using a "contact us" page.

I've discovered a simple fact, "the more visible I am the more vendors calls I get." I assume that is an indicator of success. Not that I want them, but the more visible I become the more of those I do get.

And, yes, I can reduce them by making the "manual signup part of my website" do more of the work, but if it reduces my overall number of calls, that might not be the best choice.

I actually use the number of solictor calls and junk emails as one sign of success. Then I deal with eliminating the problem, spam filters, etc. I'd rather drive the calls higher while dealing with the extra problem.

If you have a way of actually eliminating the junk calls without impacting the sales, I'd like to hear it.

I definitely agree with the flash aspects. I still have clients who are so enamored with it, but it's the equivalent of eating junk food.

I do not agree with the contact form. Sure have specific list building and lead generating forms on your landing pages that's critical. But by all means make it easy for your visitors to get in touch with you. It's silly not to have one and very easy to protect from spam with a simple captcha. And a form is certainly better than have a live email address listed which you can't protect from spam.

Disagree with #4 - images. I have a ton of images that really work for me. Awww... Just messin' with you. I'm an artist of course I need the images. I get what you're saying about non-creative's images. And the rest of your suggestions.

Laura Klover

RE: #4 Long Pages of Text.

I know there is conflicting information out there about this topic. All I can say is from a user perspective, I never read them. I suggest having a button/link on the top third of the page where people can take immediate action, and to repeat this in different forms throughout the page if one insists on using a long page. I also like bolds and highlights so that I can just skim. Long pages of text without either several call to action buttons or skimming aids make me immediately leave.

Michael

I agree with everything except #5, but possibly because of my industry. We sell really complicated products that almost require a discussion before the sale. So, if there's no contact page, then customers will be frustrated. Having the page with minimal information input (and a good spam filtering tool in the page) is key to getting the conversation started.

Kipp Bodnar

So we have had a lot of comments about deleting contact us forms. Let me defend my point a little more.

To be clear I am talking about the form not the contact us page. It is important to have a contact us page that allows current customers and partners to find phone and e-mail contact information to contact your business.

However, using a contact us form becomes a crutch. Businesses end up using it has a contact method for existing customers and for lead generation. These forms also attract lots of spam. By using separate forms for offers business can better qualify leads and improve conversion rate because offers set an expectation of getting something.

Contact us forms send some information into a "black hole" with little expectations so people use them less.

Use you contact us PAGE for customers and partners. Use landing pages with forms for lead generation.

In your "#5. Contact Us Form" paragraph, you have a misspelling. One of your sentences reads:

"Landing pages provide a dedicated form that is connected to a lead gernation offer."

Instead of "gernation," shouldn't it say "generation"? Very nice article, other than that small thing. I agree with most of what you said about avoiding industry jargon, having too many photos, and other distractions.

I strongly disagree with removing Contact Us forms. They do work and are expected by customers and prospects. Some of the most qualified leads can come from Contact Us forms. Why? Prospects are sometimes skeptical about filling out landing page forms and don't want to disclose information before they have evaluated several pages on your site. When this behavior happens it is important to have a Contact Us form in place. I would also recommend keeping the form and not opting for posting a contact email. Why? With a form you can ask for specific criteria that you later use to categorize the types of inquiries you get from the form in your CRM system.

On the other hand, I am a big proponent of creating landing page forms and having them fully integrated with a marketing automation system and Adwords.

Great summary and all important. I've learned to lightly dummy down all of my language because my site doesn't serve experts. Photos, I love them for color and adding creativity and I use them only to illustrate posts and pages. About long pages for any reason... good advice. Even though long 'sales' copy has shown to do well, I think it's viewed as a scam tactic that uses skilled persuasion techniques, etc. About forms, keep them short, sweet, optional, helpful, and professional especially in today's non-phone oriented world!

I have deleted the massive amount of internal links on my site . My home page had several links to the same page ( with the different anchor texts ) and I think this was affecting the ranking of my site . I have also reduced the amount of outbound links helping my ( real ) linking partners get the benefit of extra juice

Thanks for stating a couple of primary notions about company web-sites, which is that they're not ads and that people visit them to find information. Anything that gets in the way of visitors finding what they want is counter-productive.

I was disappointed to not see auto-play music and auto-play video on the list. These are the #1 offenders when it comes to driving people away from a web site.

I would also strongly discourage the use of roll-over pop-ups. Yahoo and then Youtube had some very visible failures trying this javascript hack. Don't let your web designers tell you it's "cool". It sucks, plain and simple.

You know what I'm talking about, right? These are hot spots on the page that pop up a small window OVER the content to push something in your face, or supposedly give you additional information. Twitter.com uses some of this on tweets to display user profile info. The problem is, they're invisible until they pop, and people tend to drift the cursor over content they're looking at. Popping something up over that is ANNOYING. You have to start worrying about where the cursor goes, so a popup doesn't cover what you're trying to look at.

I agree! This is all sound advice -- except #5. I am still a fan of quick and unobtrusive, optional form on the about page. It's convenient. The LP is a better strategy, I agree, but I don't think they are mutually exclusive.

One problem (just one) with having email addresses on your site instead of contact forms is that it's difficult to track the source that generated the email. Forms are easy to track using tools like Google Analytics. And where's the data that says "people don't like contact forms"?? We've tested it both ways and see very little (if any) difference in response rates.

Reading all comments I also have the experience that a well designed contactform proves it usefulness. Some tips: - the less fields to fill out, the better - give meaningful helptext at every field and/or examples how one should give their telephonenumber - the most important one: manage the expectations what happens after filling out and sending the form. I see a lot of 'Thank you for filling out, we will get to you soon' But what means 'soon'? For me it means the same day, fore somebody else three days is good aswell. Use something like 'We will get back to you within two working days' and DO SO!

Something about long text, I do agree on that also, but I use two solutions to make it easier for people to decide if they want to read the whole text or just pieces: - I use a summary of aspects the text is about in the top of the text. Then I use anchors to point to parts of the text 'below' - I use the 'read more' so only people that are really interested in reading more will read the whole text.

This seems to be one of those topics where both sides seem to feel strongly about - with some seemingly good reasons to keep a contact form especially from @Julie and @Jaap.

I would definitely be interested in reading more about the advantages of removing the contact form but with more detail. In addition, @Alex mentioned adding Quick Forms, which I would be more interested in learning more about as I hadn't come across this before. How does a Quick Form differ from a contact form and what advantages does it offer?

I'd agree with what several other people have said about contact forms. We find them to be beneficial to our clients. Would I like to see clients gather information by some other form of lead capture, as well? Absolutely! But, as a consumer, I don't like websites that don't allow me to contact the website through some form other than a lead capture/free offer. Sometimes I just have a question or a comment.

As for the rest of the list, I breathed a sigh of relief as I read the list, wishing that all of my clients would read this and comply.

Great post and I'm excited to see all the responses you've received. I have to agree that contact forms are still important. I agree with you that it's better to have a call to action type form, but I must echo some of the other opinions cited above - I do get many inquiries from plain old vanilla contact us forms.

Other than that one exception, I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your suggestions.

Text need not to be too lengthy as long as it conveys all the necessary information that your visitors and potential customers must know. And I don't agree with the idea of deleting the contact form in our websites. Removing it is like disabling the communication process which can result in losing your customers.

The post is very much appreciated. Thank you.

spot

Great post. I must say I agree with all the points you mentioned especially #5 concerning 'contact form' on the contact page... had one removed it for same reasons you mentioned. I think its best left for landing pages. Cheers.

I find it amusing that a Hubspot blog post suggests we should remove the contact form off our website, but a "conversion form" is part of the Hubspot website grader.

Granted, the website grader references forms such as email newsletter signups, but still... I agree with earlier posters, the form benefits greatly outweigh the problem of having to delete a few spam emails.

If you get a lot of spam, there are plenty of tools out there to help thwart a good bit of it.

I manage a few hundred small business websites and in most cases the contact form is the only thing that provides direct customer connections every week. Want to prevent the spam? Then add CAPTCHA. 45 visitors on average look at my customer's sites every day and they get at least 3 emails per week through the contact form.

In any case, hands down that's a bad suggestion for my market, but maybe not for others. I'd like to see the empirical data behind the suggestion.

While many people have already mentioned it: To our company, the forms are a big thing. It provides us many leads. While I do think that forms should be kept to a minimum; Don't ask to much / ask only the needed things. Many users who have a simple question on for example a contact-us page, do not care to give out their location, phone-number etc., just to get a simple question answered. I know I personally don't, so why would I do it to my (potential) customers? Again: Forms are a helpful tool in my eyes, as long as they are simple ;o)

I think most misunderstood what Kipp was saying about contact pages. He did mean to build out a webform rather than just post an email address. Of course you want people to contact you!

Also, #3 is important and is often the most ignored advice. Back in 1996 when I put up my first website, I was told by a wise friend "30% of surfers NEVER scroll, so make your pages short.

Excellent advice. I followed it on every site I built & my conversions were high.

I followed the same advice when I started selling high-end haircare products on ebay...I managed to make listings that had the photo, description and a bullet list of advantages in 3 columns, it all fit into 1 browser window.

I was the top seller in every category I listed in for the entire time I sold on Ebay, largely because I didnt make the customers work too hard to see what I was selling.

My images were compressed so that they didn't exceed 40k each and the customer could look at the product photograph while reading the short, but on-point description, while looking at the bullet list next to it telling them what I could do for them.

LOOK at your site in 1024 x 768, make sure your font is not so big as to force scrollilng.

These days, browsers can be zoomed in, so you don't need to have a large font on your site.

Design for the lowest common denominator..check your server stats and see what resolution/browsers are being used and design for them. Everyone else can zoom if they choose.

Nothing worse than having to scroll down past lines and lines of gigantic text.

Deanna Figueroa

Sorry, don't know how all those extra carriage returns got into the comment. :(

Our contact form yields very high quality leads with little or no spam. We have calls to action throughout the website while offering prospects a variety of ways to contact us. Different people think differently —no surprise there— so it stands to reason that different folks have different communication preferences. The prospect's urgency often has significant bearing on their communication choices.

I agree with the first four and 1/2 of #5. My opinion on contact forms is that if they are a part of a 'Call to Action' they work. For example, our product requires that you actually come to our physical location to try it, so we ask people to fill out a contact form before coming by. Most leads we get from that contact form are qualified.

Great piece - and truly refreshing to see what should go away versus what needs to be added. However, I have to disagree with you on removing a Contact Us page - we've seen consistent, qualified traffic come through that page. It generates less spam than any group or generic email address on the site - no plans to remove now, but keep the ideas coming!

What?!? No contact form? That's some of the oddest advice I've ever heard. Maybe it's semantics, or maybe I'm not understanding something, but a contact form on a web site is a must. We've built up a database of thousands of opt-in names w/our regular contact form...people who are interested in moving down the sales funnel.

Otherwise a strong post, but removing a contact form from your web site is rendering it useless.

Archie Goodwin

Interesting, info, but I don't completely agree with #4. Other studies have shown that people WILL scroll down if they find the information appealing enough. Here's an article I read about it not long ago that highlights this particular issue: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/

RE: #5, I have to agree with Rich, I would never remove the contact form from our websites. It does make sense to include a brief contact form on the landing page so people don't have to leave it (if you're running a PPC campaign for example).

From experience, I disagree with #5... better to capture one or two leads that you perhaps would not have received, than not have that chance. There are also ways to block/avoid spam from being sent.

Of course you wouldnt depend on the contact us form as the major generator of leads though - there are other things ADDITIONAL that you'd do - a simple phone number on the home page nice and clear goes a looong way, just for starters.... anyway, I digress :)

Having said that - great article.. points 1-4 are great advice - cheers.

I wouldn't have expected a post like this from hubspot. I would have assumed that they would have done some actual research and given test results when giving out information on what should not be on a site. Plus, what's good for one type of site has nothing to do with another type of site.

#1 ... animation... you're absolutely correct in most cases. Except of course for high end multimedia productions such as movie and music sites. Unfortunately, this is nothing new.

#2 jargon ... the exception being a site that requires a particular jargon in order to effectively communicate to that particular niche.

#3.. you can have a decent number of images and still have a fast loading website. It's about server speed, site cache, and optimized images.

#4.. do you have any statistics to back this up? How long exactly is this page we're on right now? The truth is that while designers find scrolling to be annoying, our test show that longer pages result in longer time on a page and ultimately better conversions. The $ is more important than opinion. Put a video at the top and the text below it and watch your conversions soar. People may not read every word, but if you keep things interesting then your conversions will go up.

#5... I don't know what you guys are smoking. The contact form is usually the first thing I look for when I go to a business site. I want to know that I can reach the people I'm about to spend money with through a phone number, address, web form, live chat, or whatever means necessary. This is especially true with local businesses where I simply need their address or phone number and they haven't bothered to put it in the header or footer files within their site. In regards to spam, we use Google Apps to manage our email, and their anti-spam rocks. I hardly ever get spam. Now if you post your actual email address on a site, you'll probably be flooded.

Yes, you should have specific lead capture forms, but hubspot is one of the worst offenders of taking this to the extreme. For instance. Hubspot regularly sends me emails giving me opportunities to download pdfs, powerpoints, etc. However, in each case you ask for all of my contact information yet again. You already have it! Otherwise, how would you email me? Instead of forcing me to re-opt in and provide all my vital data every single time, simply use a service like infusionsoft to tag my lead account with the fact that I took an action. You'll have a lot less frustration from me and most likely many others.

Thank you... I appreciate hubspot, but I just completely disagree with most of this post.

de4e

Good article. Especially #5. Usually it's fun when I need to inform site admins that contact form doesn't work. So there are no way to contact with anybody)

Your comments re. point #5 are absolutely spot on, and you've highlighted my single biggest frustration with Hubspot in the process.

I don't want to turn this into a Hubspot-beating exercise, but I'd go as far as to say that there have been occasions where I've thought about downloading an eBook or a PDF or whatever and then decided I can't be bothered to re-enter all my information for the fifteenth time! So it's not all that great for customer retention.

Tony's suggestion of using a service like infusionsoft is excellent, and I hope this feedback is useful.

Disagree about contact forms - for me they serve the important function of pre-screening. I don't want to work with every potential client who contacts me, and my contact form lets me get the most critical information I need before giving them my time.

@ Tony Darrick Baker - Thanks for the tip on Infusionsoft, I hadn't heard of it before, but am going to check it out!

Colleen Cole

In regards to number 5, I recently watched an archived webinar from Hubspot and it suggested to use “Contact Us” Forms to turn website visitors into leads. Has this suggestion now changed? If so, what is the reason behind this change?

#5 However the contact page is here to stay. We can just redesign then rename it landing page. SPAM should not prevent any web site owner to provide a way for prospects to give a feedback, leave comments or simply make request. Typical landing pages require only a First name and email address which is quite sufficient is you are building a mailing list. By in most cases those typical landing pages are not a place for the end user to make a verbal request.

I have to disagree with #5. Contact us forms while on many websites and in many place are somewhat generic, they offer several different options for people to contact the site owner. Too many times have I come to websites that find themselves clever and they are too cool to provide ANY contact information- no email, no phone and oh by the way they did away with the contact us form too. People don't want to have to search for it- making contact information opportunities readily available- priceless.

Good points. However the issue with the contact form, isn't the spam or the like. It is that queen most cases the forms have been badly designed, and are asking for too much information or just don't allow a visual flow for ease of completion. Sometimes designing a form is best left to a web design specialist. In this area the devil is in the details One thing however you should never do is have the form the sole method of contact, nothing screams lack of credibility louder than not have a real world phone and at least postal address, especially for a business site.